Life

When Diversity Brings Adversity

It’s usually an unwillingness to accept and understand

Diversity and inclusion. Two tenants, which mean a lot of different things to a ton of different people. And that my friends is where the adversity comes in. To become a diverse group of enlightened Humans, we all need to understand and accept the one common denominator that every one of us is unique and has individual differences.

It may be the color of our skin, our ethnicity, our sexual orientation, our physical abilities, and ugh, yes, our political belief or any other ideology which sets us apart from each other.

With true diversity comes acceptance and understanding.

Becoming a genuinely diverse species is not like making an omelet. You don’t get the opportunity to crack a couple of eggs, although any white supremacists with a baseball bat will probably try to tell you otherwise. With true diversity comes acceptance and understanding. Not pounding someone into submission because they don’t walk, talk, look, think, and believe the same way you do.

I believe the biggest problem with true diversity is that many of us just aren’t willing to accept someone different than us. Case in point. What about all the Evangelical Christians who draw a line in the sand with their homophobic rants? To hear them tell it, every member of the LBGTQIA community is going to hell and should be banished from the country.

No acceptance and indeed no understanding.

What about all the white, privileged Kens and Karens in this country who threaten peaceful protesters with weapons and report innocent members of the Black community for standing outside a grocery store while talking on the phone, or for, excuse the hell out of them, engaging in a morning run?

Again, with diversity comes adversity.

It’s upsetting to them because we’re not like them. They don’t want a transgender couple living next door. What would their misunderstanding, non-accepting friends say if they knew the couple had been over for a cookout?

The shame and embarrassment would just be too much.

If your not white, you aren’t right. If you’re queer, it’s no thank you, dear. If you’re anything that makes a person uncomfortable, forces someone to actually use that noggin in their brain to understand, and makes them change the way of looking at things and gain acceptance, it ain’t happening.

Thus the adversity.

I, for one, am oh, so tired of the stubbornness of some of my geriatric brothers and sisters, who were spoonfed hate and prejudice their entire lives, and have passed these misunderstanding and non-accepting ways to their children, and their children’s children.

They’re breeding the very adversity, which, in almost every case, makes it practically impossible to become a diverse, enlightened community.

True story.

I have a very good friend of mine whom I met ten years ago at work. She, as luck would have it, happens to be a writer, so we naturally bonded. At our first Christmas party, an associate and I met her husband, a cheery, and quite charming professor at a local college. When the associate and I walked away, he whispered to me, “I didn’t know she was married to a black man.”

I stopped, looked at him and kind of gave him the Victrola dog stare then said, “what the hell difference does that make?”

“Well, I mean, she’s white, and he’s black. Don’t you see a problem with that?”

My reply?

“Well, you’re an idiot, and yet I still let you hang around with me. Do you see a problem with that?”

The young man opened his mouth to retort, thought better of it, then turned around and walked away.

This September (if I don’t get laid off) will be my tenth year with the company, and that gentleman and I have not had a single conversation with one another since that night.

See folks, the problem with diversity is that with it comes the usual suspects who refuse to understand, who adamantly resist acceptance. They’ve either been mistaught, or they just can’t get over the initial uneasiness of being around someone different than they are. All of their lives they’ve lived by the golden rule that birds of a feather can only flock together.

And they resist, and with their resistance comes adversity, sometimes to the point of innocent people getting hurt. Sometimes to the point of bloodshed. But to make this happen, to truly become a diverse band of Humans, we need to stand together.

We need to lock arms, whatever color of plumage we’re sporting. We need to skirt around the Kens and Karens and join together and stand tall, whatever our sexual orientations, our religious beliefs, or our political ideologies.

We need to move forward as the race, our race of diverse, caring, and understanding Humans.

True diversity will always bring about adversity, but it’s time for a change, and I’m willing to throw this old cowboy hat of mine in the ring. Uh, not my Felt; I just had it cleaned. How about this old straw I been wearing when I do yard work?

What? It’s a hat.

Thank you so much for reading. You didn’t have to, but I’m certainly glad you did.

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© P.G. Barnett, 2020. All Rights Reserved.